Merrill Kaplan
Contact Information
Associate Professor, Departments of English and Germanic Languages and Literatures, College of Arts and Sciences
Research Interests
- Internet and Online Platforms
- Narrative
- Text Analysis
- Vernacular Contestation
I study and teach about belief narratives, rumor, conspiracy theory, and what folklorists like me call legend -- vernacular contestation of truth that moves through social networks both online and off. This puts me in the neighborhood of misinfo, disinfo, fake news, and the like, though my discipline uses different terms. I presented “Story, News, Snark, Joke: Narrative in Circulation" -- which looked at data from Twitter and mass media -- at The Far-Right: Examining its Roots and Challenging its Reach, a virtual symposium organized by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, October 12-13, 2022.